Ep. 19 – Paul Yantus: Building a Channel Community Through Sharing

Paul Yantus is Vice President of Marketing at 360insights, a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in channel marketing software with over 20 years of technology and channel experience. Paul’s first startup launched an early version of Through-Channel Marketing Automation over 25 years ago. Paul has built channels from the ground up and led large global businesses with mature channels of over 10,000 partners. These days Paul is the man behind the curtain at 360insights orchestrating marketing and thought leadership.

The Spark that starts a Pulse

How do channel leaders develop their knowledge? Where do they go to learn about the latest trends and best practices? Is there a source for bench-marking information? These were all on Paul Yantus’ mind when the idea for the Channel Pulse™ originated.

At 360insights we spend a lot of time with key channel leaders. Last year we had the privilege of participating in Channel Focus‘ Club 50. Seeing how willing channel leaders shared information and collaborated with each other brought out the entrepreneur in Paul. He immediately wanted to create a community for sharing thoughts and ideas about today’s channel challenges.

Paul sums it up: “The challenge was getting channel leaders to step away from their jobs and go someplace and focus on this stuff, which is really a hard thing to do. I felt like maybe there was a lighter weight way to gather trends and best practices without having to leave the office.” He went on to say, “maybe there’s a way to bring it to you as a channel leader as opposed to you coming to it.”

His value proposition for channel leaders is simple: put in a little time sharing your thoughts and get a lot back out of it. Join a community of like-minded channel professionals sharing thoughts and ideas about how to address today’s channel challenges.

Getting the channel community started

Yantus thought the best way to build a community of channel professionals was to gather and share information that prompts more sharing. His goal is to start a conversation by asking a few thought provoking questions, provide a little food to spark thought, and then let the audience decide where they want to go with it.

Having a large database of channel professionals at his disposal that 360insights developed over the last decade, he launched the first Channel Pulse asking these questions:

How will your channel incentive spending change in 2019?

What channel incentive has the best return on investment?

Which incentives will you use more or less of in 2019?

How good is your visibility to various channel activities and where do you need better visibility?

360insights is now ready to publish the first Channel Pulse which shares what we learned from channel professionals by asking these questions. Paul said, “we haven’t even published the first report and the few people who’ve seen it already want to dive to the next level.” This is exactly what he hoped would happen.

Where will Channel Pulse go from here?

Paul has a big vision for Channel Pulse. It starts with thought provoking questions, publishing answers every quarter and getting the conversation started. It likely morphs to in person events to dive deeper. In the end we hope it builds a big community of sharing ideas, thoughts, best practices and more.

The Channel Pulse report is made available free of charge to any interested party. Those interested in obtaining a copy and/or participating in the Channel Pulse community and any future reports or events can do so at www.TheChannelPulse.com.

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